Thursday, October 18, 2012

Caching In On Leftovers

Caching In On Leftovers

Posted: 17 Oct 2012 1

For
Wolf Awareness Week 2012, we’re sharing some of our favorite facts
about wolves. Help us spread the word by sharing the image below on Facebook.

Wolves are capable of consuming an incredible amount of meat—up to 20 pounds in a single sitting
—and
sometimes they do. But they don’t always clean their plate, so to
speak. Much of the time, wolves will save some for later by “caching”
part of their bounty in case food becomes scarce. According to the Wolf Education & Research Center,
wolves will cache as little as a single piece up to 15 pounds of meat
from any given meal by burying it in the dirt. Doing so prevents ravens
and other scavengers from stealing the surplus so that wolves can return
and feed on it later.

Wolves hunt two bull elk in Yellowstone. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service.

Wolves are known for their skilled hunting of larger prey, but
they’re also opportunistic scavengers. It takes a lot less effort for a
wolf to feast on the cached remains of a dead animal than it does to try
to take down a live one that’s five to ten times its size. Further,
food is often scarce during certain times of the year and in certain
places, so it pays to keep a stash hidden for those lean times. If
you’ve ever seen a dog burying a bone in the backyard, they’re following
the same instinctual behavior from their canid ancestors, the wolves.

Because of their incredible sense of smell,
wolves can easily detect old meat that’s been buried in order to locate
their food caches. Unfortunately, this behavior can also get them into
trouble. Livestock producers will often maintain open carcass pits of
animals that die from a variety of causes—bad weather, disease, birthing
complications, fatal injuries—and these pits can attract wolves from
miles away. Some pits are fenced off or buried deep underground, but
many of them are not protected at all. Once a wolf gets wind of an open
carcass pit, they will often return again and again, treating it as
their own personal food cache. As a result, ranchers greatly increase
the likelihood that wolves will eventually come into conflict with any
other livestock using the area.

One of the most important wolf coexistence strategies Defenders employs is helping ranchers identify
major attractants like carcass pits and cleaning them up. By properly
disposing of dead animals off-site or burying them deeper underground,
ranchers can greatly reduce the chances of wolves becoming routine
visitors to their livestock operation. These actions have been
critically important in the Northern Rockies and adjacent states like
Oregon and California where wolves have only recently returned. We’ve
been able to help ranchers avoid disaster by cleaning up old carcass
pits before wolves discover them, increasing the odds that wolves can
share the landscape with livestock without turning them into dinner.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone